Search This Blog

Watandost in Urdu, Turkish and Farsi means "friend of the nation or country". The blog contains news and views about Pakistan and broader South West Asia that are insightful but are often not part of the headlines. It also covers major debates in Muslim societies across the world.

Who Conducted the attack on Lahore's Police Academy

LAHORE: Authorities investigating the March 30 terrorist attack on the Manawan Police Training School in Lahore have identified Qari Hussain Mehsud, a close associate of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) chief Baitullah Mehsud, as the mastermind of the 30/3 assault, who had been shuttling between Rawalpindi and Lahore through the Grand Trunk road for the past few months and had personally visited the site of Monday’s attack before choosing it as the next target to launch Fidayee attack.

According to circles close to those investigating the Manawan attack, Hijratullah alias Nadeem Asghar, one of the terrorists captured alive by the security forces from outside the police training school while the military operation was still on, has disclosed that he was working under the command of Qari Hussain Mehsud, a key TTP commander loyal to Baitullah Mehsud.

Hussain, who has already been named by Baitullah as his successor in case of his death, is notorious for training suicide bombers and sending them on fatal missions. The investigators say the three terrorists who eventually blew themselves up inside the Manawan Police Training Centre on Monday to avoid being caught alive, had actually been trained in suicide bombing by Qari Hussain at his training camp in the Spinkai Ragzai area of South Waziristan.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Inside Story about Musharraf-Mahmood TussleHassan Abbas: September 24, 2006

General Pervez Musharraf’s memoir In the Line of Fire is expected to generate a lot of debate and discussion in the days to come. Except some western journalists and Musharraf’s close friends (three ghost writers) hardly anyone has had a chance yet to read the book from cover to cover. The excerpts of the book leaked through Indian media and General Musharraf’s statements to some American media outlets however have already created some controversies. In the United States, controversy is considered a positive thing, so the book is bound to become a bestseller here, but in Pakistan probably the opposite is true.

This article is not a review of the book (as I haven’t got hold of a copy yet), but it endeavors to throw some light on the widely reported Musharraf comment about the Armitage threat conveyed through Lieutenant General Mahmood Ahmed, the then Director General of the ISI. I had done research on this speci…

From Stalemate to Settlement: Lessons for Afghanistan from Historical Insurgencies That Have Been Resolved Through Negotiations
by Colin P. Clarke, Christopher Paul, RAND, 2014

In June 2013, the Afghan Taliban opened a political office in Qatar to facilitate peace talks with the U.S. and Afghan governments. Negotiations between the United States and the group that sheltered al-Qaeda would have been unthinkable 12 years ago, but the reality is that a negotiated settlement in Afghanistan is one of several possible end games under the current U.S. withdrawal plan. Negotiating an end to an insurgency can be a long and arduous process beset by false starts and continued violence, but a comprehensive review of historical cases that ended in settlement shows that these negotiations followed a similar path that can be generalized into a "master narrative." This research examines 13 historical cases of insurgencies that were resolved through negotiated settlement in which neither sid…

‘Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please’. Mark Twain

Pakistan is in the throes of a judicial crisis since March 2007. On March 09, 2007, general Pervez Mussharraf summoned chief justice Muhammad Iftikhar Chaudry to army house. He was asked some tough questions and then asked to resign. Chief justice held his ground and refused. He was kept at army house for several hours so that an acting chief justice could be sworn in. Justice Javed Iqbal was sworn in as the senior most judge justice Rana Baghwan Das was out of country. Chaudry was given the title of ‘suspended’ chief justice and his case referred to Supreme Judicial Council (SJC) for action. This started a crisis where majority of the people denounced the cavalier manner in which general Mussharraf dealt with the chief justice. Legal community fully supported chief justice by boycotting courts and b…